Prior art printers include rendering systems that reside in a printer. Application software is used to create a digital image, and a print driver is used to convert the digital image into a rasterized form using well-known techniques in the art that is suitable to be received into a video buffer of a laser printer. Internally of the printer, a print data pipeline of the printer performs several operations upon the transferred print data as the print data enters the pipeline in preparation for printing. These operations include print data compression, print data decompression, color space conversion, and half-toning. Typically, the various processing operations are performed by a processor under the control of printer firmware.
Another technique uses a hardware-limited, low-cost implementation (such as a Sleek implementation) that relies on a host to obtain processing power and buffering capabilities. An imaging laser is raced over an I/O port at real-time. However, such implementation occurs at real-time and is dependent on performance of the input/output (I/O) channel. Therefore, such implementation is time constrained. There exists a need to provide for an implementation that is less dependent upon the I/O channel, has no real-time constraints, and can work over a network system.